Meet Ingie Hovland

Assistant Professor, Religion Department & Institute for Women’s Studies

When did you start teaching in the WIP?

I began in 2022, the same year that I was a Writing Fellow.

What WIP courses are you teaching/have you taught?

This is my third year in a row teaching WMST 4010W Feminist Theories.

Why did you join the WIP?

I had heard great things about the benefits of having a WIP TA in the classroom, and I decided to try it out when I was scheduled to teach the upper-level feminist theory seminar.

What have you learned from your experiences as WIP faculty? About teaching? About writing? About your students?

One of the things that has stood out to me is how much WIP has contributed to creating a scholarly community in the writing-intensive class. I have a special interest in student reading, and so I am always trying to form a reading community in the classroom. When I signed up for WIP, I was not expecting it to directly support that community experience, but it has.

What is your WIP teaching philosophy?

Since I use reading as the starting point for my class design, my WIP teaching philosophy can be summed up as “writing to read”: I ask students in my classes to engage in different forms of writing as a way of deepening their advanced, discipline-specific reading skills. Reading in the humanities—and especially in a theory seminar—is an ongoing and open-ended conversation between the text and other texts, the author and other authors, the reader and other readers. To be able to engage in this conversation, students need to continue practicing advanced humanities reading skills such as understanding others’ perspectives, asking good open-ended questions, thinking in complex ways, arriving at contestable interpretations, and formulating their own creative responses to texts. Writing can help them with each of these steps toward becoming even stronger readers.

How do you put that philosophy into practice in the classroom?

Most days, students prepare for my class by completing a reading and then making a map of it (I have attached instructions for these reading maps below). During the first 5 minutes of each class period, they share their maps with the people sitting next to them. We then have a class discussion about the reading, and while I vary the discussion format from day to day to keep it interesting, there is always some form of informal writing involved during the course of the discussion. At the end of every two or three-week module, there is a more formal writing assignment in which students articulate their current response to one or more of the readings we have engaged with—often this reading response takes the form of a “difficulty paper” in which students try to explain a particular difficulty they encountered in their interactions with and around the readings. They share their reading responses with each other in class, as well as on eLC, as a way of helping to turn our class into a reading (writing) community. At the end of the semester they also present their final project (an unessay) to the class, and this is the point when it becomes most evident to everyone that our class community has not only engaged with a series of theoretical readings but has also become part of that ongoing theoretical conversation.

What are your biggest challenges you face as a WIP teacher/in your WIP courses?

Weighing the effects of grading students’ writing versus giving feedback without a grade.

How do you address those challenges?

I have now started using a simplified version of labor-based ungrading.

What do you hope students take away from your WIP courses? How do students benefit from the writing-intensive nature of your course?

Some of the recent scholarship on the purposes of humanities pedagogy has started framing “learning” in terms of “life,” and I am drawn to that perspective. So I hope my students take away the ability to expand their ways of seeing, thinking, feeling, being with themselves, and being with others in life.

Why is it important that students write in your class?

So that they can engage more deeply in our ongoing humanities conversations.

Resource: